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Day: 30 April 2013

Christie Cup swan song for netball teams

The Armitage was filled with a combined atmosphere of energy and nerves with the purple banners of the Christie Cup reminding everyone, not that they needed it, of the importance of the day’s events.

The first game, Manchester 2nds –v- Liverpool 2nds gave hope of a promising day ahead as it was exceptionally close throughout. Manchester took an early lead which was perhaps expected however they were unable to maintain their efforts and Liverpool came back with a great fight. The teams at the end looked evenly matched and so was the score line as it was set to be an eventful draw. However, a controversial and dramatic ending, which saw the umpire blow for full time but allow a goal scored after the whistle to be counted, let Liverpool take the game by 25 goals to 24. This decision was to the utter dismay of both players and supports and unfortunately was allowed to stand. This didn’t take away from the performance of the seconds with Medic April Diviney receiving player of the match in her inspiring final game for the club.

The following game saw Manchester first team, with a superb combination of Krista Enziano and Jodi May as shooters, take an easy win again Liverpool 1st. Manchester looked like they had something to prove after a seemingly disappointing season that saw them saved from relegation in their final game. Recent training had proven successful and set plays and passing through the court made Liverpool look unorganised and weak. With Captain Sarah Hopkins setting a shining example in defence the team cruised to victory with a 43-28 win. Katie Coates was rewarded for her hard work and fight as centre with player of the match and will look to lead the team next year after the exits of Enziano, May and Hopkins who will be greatly missed by the club.

After their unfortunate defeat to Liverpool, Manchester 2nds came out stronger and had to endure another close encounter against Leeds 2nd who, after beating Liverpool by double score, seemed a hard team to beat. Defenders Faye and April gave a resilient performance whilst an energised Milly MacManus in centre court lead with passion to ensure a victory in her final performance for the team. Player of the match went to Rosie Culkin Smith whose consistent shooting combined with quick thinking and movement made her stand out in sadly her last performance also.

The 1st then had to win against their bogey team Leeds, after losing to them twice in the league, to retain the Christie Cup title. They did this in style. Fresher’s Abbie, Paris and Sophia performances gave hope for a successful forthcoming season whilst club captain Lauren Palmer stood strong against her pushy opponent to ease the ball out of defence. Their victory saw Krista Enziano take player of the match with an almost infallible shooting performance showing just why she’s Northern Thunders number 1.

Those who played their final matches for the university had performances they should all be proud of and their honourable exits were made even sweeter by retaining the title of netball Christie Cup Champions.

Interview: Wild Nothing

“I’m not really sure what we are at this point.” Seven days ago, Jack Tatum was in Melbourne; today, he joins me in Sound Control’s deserted basement bar on the other side of the world, having stopped off to play shows in Japan on his way. It’s probably not inaccurate to say that he is Wild Nothing; that’s the name he chose to attach to the musical project he dedicated much of his final year of university to, with debut record Gemini the end product back in 2010. Since, he’s been almost constantly on tour with a five-piece band, prompting me to ask whether he still feels like the project is his own. “It’s a weird grey area. On the road, it definitely feels like a band; the live show’s all about how we individually interpret the songs I made – there’s five different takes on them. But the records are all me. Gemini was all me, and so was Nocturne, save for the drums.”

There’s clearly significance to the decision to name the first album after the astrological sign represented on the zodiac by twins; Tatum had to balance Gemini’s production with his studies whilst at college in his native Virginia. “I definitely didn’t graduate with the highest of honours,” he laughs, “but the timing worked out great, you know. I was finished at college a month before the record came out. I was working on it my whole senior year, so it became a pretty big distraction. I was just glad that I managed to get both things finished, in the end.”

Once Gemini had managed to wing its way into the wider world, things began to take off at breakneck pace for Wild Nothing. “There was a long period of time when I just didn’t get the chance to reflect on it. The album came out in summer of 2010, and we started touring that same summer. We toured right through the fall, had a little bit of time off and then we were right back into playing in the spring, and then we went to Europe straight afterwards. It definitely forced me out of my comfort zone, but it really worked in my favour second time around. I was way more prepared – I knew what I was getting myself into.”

Nocturne, Tatum’s sophomore effort, dropped last year. It was conceived, for the most part, in Savannah, Georgia, before being fleshed out in Brooklyn, New York. “There was nothing intentional about that; it just so happened that I was living in Georgia when I was writing the songs, and that I’d moved to Brooklyn by the time I came to actually record them. It was just reflective of the weird way in which my life’s progressed since I’ve been doing this. I’ve basically been on tour ever since I graduated – whenever we were on breaks, I’d just be staying with friends, or going back to my parents’ place. It took me a while to get settled. I moved to Georgia because it was cheap and I had friends there. I was sort of waiting for the right producer to come up for the record, and the guy I ended up working with (Nicolas Vernhes) was actually based in the same neighbourhood I’d moved to in Brooklyn.”

Having made Gemini exclusively through his laptop, access to a recording studio was always going to provide the opportunity for Tatum to take a major step forward. “The biggest thing was just having a producer, having somebody extremely knowledgeable to work with. I mean, obviously I had a lot of nice equipment at my disposal for the first time, too; I could never have had a string section on a song before, but I was able to do that on ‘Shadow’. But I never wanted to use any of that to pursue a wholly different sound to the first album; it was just nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off, to help me tweak things. The other thing that helped was just having a time restriction, because we only had three weeks to record – that prevented me from overthinking things.”

Another major consideration for Tatum in the making of Nocturne was that the songs would have to be reproduced in a live setting, something he hadn’t had to think about on Gemini. “I had to be able to translate the experiences I’d had on the road into my songwriting; I had an idea of what worked and what didn’t,” he says. “I had to sort of map out how these new songs were going to sound onstage; it was kind of restrictive, in a sense, because that’s always in the back of your mind. You’re constantly thinking that maybe you shouldn’t add this or that, because you’d need to find a way to make it work live.”

The implementation of the string section, he says, was merely an attempt to ‘complete’ that particular track. “I don’t think I was necessarily trying to be more expansive on this record. I just think that, if a song’s calling out for a certain something, you should do everything you can to try and figure out what it is and how you can use it. My only real ambition for this album was to make a polished pop record – I was obsessed with that idea.”

Tonight’s Sound Control show marks Wild Nothing’s fifth appearance in Manchester already; three visits to The Deaf Institute on the touring cycle for Gemini were followed up by a support slot to The Walkmen, across the road at The Ritz. It’s impossible to miss the influence that Manchester has had on Tatum’s songwriting; both of his records seem born, primarily, of British influence. “The musical history of Manchester has inspired me in so many ways,” he says. “Obviously all of the Factory bands, and The Smiths – they’re huge influences. The first time we came here, it was such a big deal for me; to be in this city where so much music that I loved was produced was incredible; it was like all those songs made a little more sense now I’d been there. I feel that every time we come back. I’ve gotta say, I feel like, as an American, I probably romanticise that stuff way more than British people probably do; I get the feeling that the young people over here aren’t quite as awed by it, as much as I’m sure they’re proud of the lineage the city has.”

Looking forward, Tatum tells me he already has a new EP finished, recorded over the course of a three-month break this past winter. “It’s pretty difficult for me to write on tour; I usually build up general ideas on tour – not necessarily even musical ideas, just whatever’s inspiring me at that moment. As much as I love touring, I’m always so happy to be home, and I seem to have these creative bursts when we first get off the road – I guess that’s how the new EP came about. We’re not too busy this summer – just some festivals – so hopefully I can keep writing. I’m always looking to the next thing.”

Empty Estate EP will be available May 13 via Captured Tracks 

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From the vault: The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow

Released: 21st October 2003

Sub Pop

On their debut record, Oh, Inverted World, The Shins offered plenty of promise; by taking a diverse range of influences, from The Beach Boys to Sunny Day Real Estate, and still managing to produce a cohesive collection of pop songs, lead singer and principle songwriter James Mercer demonstrated a mastery of his ability to match addictive melodies with delightfully smart lyricism. The release of their second full-length effort, Chutes Too Narrow, delivered on this potential critically and commercially, with unanimously positive reviews, sales of almost 400,000 and, perhaps more dubiously, Natalie Portman’s now infamous proclamation that the band would ‘change your life’ in Garden State. Most strikingly, though, Chutes fulfilled the creative potential present throughout Inverted, raising Mercer from the level of talented singer-songwriter to musical auteur.

2003 was by no means a fallow year for indie rock breakthroughs – Death Cab for Cutie, The Decemberists and Broken Social Scene all made their respective marks with well-received releases – but it was The Shins who produced the undeniable standout, with the scratchy, bedroom-recorded sound of their debut giving way to high fidelity; cleaner vocals, sharper guitars and a punchier rhythm section. That’s not to say that the band’s variety of influences was narrowed as a consequence; opener ‘Kissing the Lipless’ evokes the spirit of Pixies, the gentle, acoustic opening engulfed by racing drums and impassioned vocals; this flirtation with the quiet-loud dynamic would be revisited on their experimental 2007 follow-up, Wincing the Night Away. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the new, cleaner production is quite how dramatically it unshackles Mercer’s voice; fans of the first album would surely not have had him down as the vocal chameleon he is on Chutes, shifting shape to fit in with each song’s tone; downbeat and melancholy on wistful closer ‘Those to Come’, quietly restrained on the Nick Drake-tinged ‘Pink Bullets’, and downright bratty on politically-charged stomper ‘So Says I’.

One attribute of Mercer’s that was never in doubt, however, was his delightful way with words; The Shins, like Belle and Sebastian and The Magnetic Fields, are a band who could provide plenty of joy simply presenting their lyrics as poetry. Societal ruminations – “Our lust for life had gone away with the rent we hated” – and deft historical observations – “just a glimpse of an ankle and I / react like it’s 1805” – are present and correct, but it’s on more familiar, lovelorn ground that they really excel; ‘Gone for Good’, a Wilco-esque country rock effort, spins a gorgeously eloquent tale of the trappings – quite literally – of monogamy.

Records like Chutes Too Narrow make you wonder about that old cliché pertaining to the second album; granted, there isn’t any shortage of sophomore efforts that have failed to live up to what came before, but perhaps if more follow-ups were crafted in the same vein as this one, with an onus on expanding on its predecessor rather than narrow-minded insistence on ‘topping’ it, we could enjoy watching a few more bands bloom like The Shins have.

From the Vault: The Doors – L.A. Woman

“Get loose!” orders Jim Morrison on the opening line to L.A. Woman. Those two words sum up why The Doors’ sixth studio album is possibly their best ever work: the shackles are off and the sound is stripped down after the grandiose but ultimately disappointing Soft Parade. It’s The Doors at their blues-rock best, and its mere existence is a miracle in itself.

Morrison’s bohemian lifestyle became an alcohol-induced spiral of self-destruction, culminating in an arrest for two counts of indecent exposure, two of public profanity, one of excessive public drunkenness and finally “simulation of oral copulation”. Very rock’n’roll. Recording sessions were a disaster, producer Paul Rothchild resigned and the band were left frustrated and bored. But then something changed. They ditched the recording studio in favour of their old rehearsal room and, much to Morrison’s delight, Jerry Scheff (of Elvis fame) was invited to the recording sessions to take on bass duties. The album suddenly sparked to life.

Krieger’s catchy guitar riff on ‘Love Her Madly’ cemented it as the lead single, and Manzarek’s bright melodies on his Vox Continental ensured it became a Doors classic. ‘Riders on the Storm’ is a more atmospheric offering, conjuring a powerful vibe of loneliness with the sound of pouring rain and thunderstorms layered over a melancholic keyboard.

You can almost imagine Morrison singing ‘Cars Hiss By My Window’ to his empty pint glass in some L.A. dive; it sees the band at their most bluesy before the title track kicks in and the album becomes a different beast entirely. ‘L.A. Woman’ is as fast-paced a rocker the band have ever recorded, a sprawling eight minute masterpiece about the allure of late ’60s Los Angeles and its “cops in cars and topless bars”. Then there’s ‘The Wasp (Texas Radio and The Big Beat)’, an outlet for Morrison’s oft-lauded poetry. It started life as part of his famous poetic interludes during gigs, but appears here as a fully-fledged slick number with a pulsating beat from Densmore on drums.

“The future’s uncertain, the end is always near” sings Morrison on earlier track ‘Roadhouse Blues’. It’s a line that was never more appropriate than during the recording of this LP,  as just two months after its release, Morrison was found dead in a Paris apartment. L.A Woman is a fitting end to the career of a true genius.